Storage demands for data storage systems tend to increase over time. As the demands for storage space increase, storage density becomes more important. Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) techniques have been developed as one way to increase storage density at a device level, but devices using SMR techniques have certain operational characteristics that must be taken into account when they are deployed in data storage systems. For example, it may be impractical to write data to SMR devices in a non-sequential fashion, similarly to many tape-based storage devices. On such devices, determining specific data contents once they are stored may be accomplished by either tracking associated data writes using an externally connected entity or by reading back and processing most or all of the stored data, which may be burdensome and/or inefficient.